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IRRADIATIONS. SAND AND SPRAY. John Gould 
Flbtchbr. 

SOME IMAGIST POETS. 

JAPANESE LYRICS. Translated by Lafcadio 
Hbarn. 

AFTERNOONS OF APRIL. Grace Hazard Conk- 

UNG. 

THE CLOISTER: A VERSE DRAMA. Emile Ver- 

HABRBN. 

INTERFLOW. Geoffrey C. Faber. 

STILLWATER PASTORALS AND OTHER POEMS. 
Paul Shivell. 

IDOLS. Walter Conrad Arensberg. 

TURNS AND MOVIES, AND OTHER TALES IN 
VERSE. Conrad Aiken. 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
Boston and New York 



IDOLS 



IDOLS 



BY 



WALTER CONRAD ARENSBERG 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

<S.ht iMttt^itt pre^itf Cambtiboe 

1916 






COPYRIGHT, I916, BY WALTER CONRAD ARENSBERG 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published March iQib 



4o\ 



ii 



'CI,A428185 

MAR 20 1916 



FOR LOU 



CONTENTS 

CLOUDS 

FOR FORMS THAT ARE FREE II 

VOYAGE A l'iNFINI 12 

DIRGE 14 

THE VOICE OF ONE DEAD I5 

JUNE 16 

TO THE GATHERER 1 7 

AT DAYBREAK 18 

AUTOBIOGRAPHIC I9 

STATUES 

THE NIGHT OF ARIADNE 25 

HUMAN 26 

THE DIVINE COMEDY 27 

AU quatrieme: rue des ecoles 28 

landscape and figures 29 

dialogue 30 

to a deserted temple at p^stum 3 1 

CRYSTALS 

PORTRAIT 35 

JOHN DAVIDSON 36 

[7] 



TO HASEKAWA 37 
SONG OF THE SOULS SET FREE 38 
AN OLD GAME 39 
AFTER-THOUGHT 4O 
FALLING ASLEEP 4I 
CONSIDER THE LILIES 42 
TO A POET 43 
TO A GARDEN IN APRIL 44 
THE INNER SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STATUES SEAT- 
ED OUTSIDE THE BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY 45 
A DYING SERVANT 46 

FOR THE SAKE OF PEACE 

TO THE NECROPHILE 5I 

AM TAG 52 

INFINITE MERCY 53 

TO LOUVAIN 54 

THE WAR LORD 5^ 
INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE SUBMARINE THAT SANK 

THE LUSITANIA 56 

TO BELGIUM 57 

NEUTRALITY 58 

TRANSLATIONS 

THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN 61 

FIFTH CANTO OF THE INFERNO 69 



CLOUDS 



IDOLS 

CLOUDS 

FOR FORMS THAT ARE FREE 

Loosen the web, Arachne, and we will waltz. 

Loosen, Arachne, 

The spider-web that has ensnared 

The feet in such a struggling bergamask. 



[ " ] 



VOYAGE A L'INFINI 

The swan existing 

Is like a song with an accompaniment 

Imaginary. 

Across the glassy lake. 

Across the lake to the shadow of the willows, 

It is accompanied by an image, 

— As by Debussy's 

" Reflets dans Peau." 

The swan that is 

Reflects 

Upon the solitary water — breast to breast 

With the duplicity: 

" The other one I " 

[ 12] 



And breast to breast it is confused. 

O visionary wedding ! O stateliness of the procession ! 

It is accompanied by the image of itself 

Alone. 

At night 

The lake is a wide silence. 

Without imagination. 



DIRGE 

Make of the moon a motion. 

You 

Who are laid to rest, 

Make of the moon about the eaves of space. 

You who upon the earth 

Are doing nothing, 

The circles of the swallow 

In the twilight, 

You who have left above the empty house 

The night 

In suspense. 



[ H] 



THE VOICE OF ONE DEAD 

Of the relented limbs and the braid, O lady. 
Bound up in haste at parting, 
The secret is kept. 



[ '5] 



JUNE 

These breaking buds, 

These buds in a nest of leaves . . . 

What wings have covered them. 

And the warmth of what brooding mother, 

That the roses. 

The roses themselves. 

Come out ? 

The roses are trying their petals . . . 
Fly away, roses, after the wind. 



[ i6] 



TO THE GATHERER 

Heavy with the life among the leaves 

The bough 

Is heavy with your hands . . . 

It yields. 

And will the yielding bough at the last 

Break ? 

Or at the last made light 

By hands that gather and cannot hold, 

Will it swing away as it used to swing, 

Out of the reach of hands. 

High with one apple ? 



[ ■?] 



AT DAYBREAK 

I HAD a dream and I awoke with it, 
Poor little thing that I had not unclasped 
After the kiss good-bye. 

And at the surface how it gasped. 

This thing that I had loved in the unlit 

Depth of the drowsy sea . . . 

Ah me. 

This thing with which I drifted toward the sky. 

Driftwood upon a wave. 
Senseless the motion that it gave. 



[i8] 



AUTOBIOGRAPHIC 

Permanently in a space that is anywhere here 
While I am I, 
I am temporarily 
Always now. 

And at the eternal 

Instant 

I look — 

The eye-glassed I 

At the not I, the opaque 

Others, 

Eye-glassed too. 

And I who see of them 

Only the glasses 

Looking, 

See of myself 

In looking-glasses 

Faces 

Distorted. 

[ 19] 



And throughout the transparent 

Spaciousness, 

Which is so extensively 

The present 

Point 

Located personally — 

A solid geometry 

Of vacancy 

Bounded by the infinite 

Absence, 

I 

Foreshorten 

To the end 

Of me . . . 

Walls and ceilings 

Of my cellular 

Isolation 

Wrecked by perspective. 

Habitable cubes 

Of static 

Surfaces of plaster 

Prolonged in flight. 

And it is I who hold them back, " 

And it is I who let them go. 

These gray planes plunging 

[ 20] 



In an emptiness 

Blue, 

These rampant sides of pyramids 

That converge 

To nothing 

While I am I. 



STATUES 



THE NIGHT OF ARIADNE 

She waited in a grotto by the sea 
The vital visit of the Minotaur 
Untouched. The night had grown oracular 
With tongues of licking heat that were not he, 
She knew not how she knew, reluctantly. 
The entrance of the grotto was a scar 
Of heaven, and in it lengthened, star by star. 
Stalactites to her credulous chastity. 

Heavy the darkness that she lay beneath ; 

The tide was swelling ; and a rosy wreath 

She vowed to an old pagan monolith. 

Her god, if it would send against the myth 

A man. . . . And in a dream she seemed to sheath 

The dripping blade that he would enter with. 



[ 25 ] 



HUMAN 

In a cathedral that aspires in thought 

I am , . , and I perhaps am not alone ! 

I am an altar to a God unknown. 

And with the candles I am clear and hot. 

And if He cannot be it matters not ; 

A reaper of the whirlwind who have sown, 

I think a God and so I am my own ; 

And toward myself so long in me forgot 

I take the ancient attitude of prayer. 
Yes, even as by the crib, beneath the flame 
Of the familiar face ... Or was it where 
I thought of one too strange who never came. 
And closed my empty arms about the air. 
Feeling the nakedness of her first name. 



[26] 



THE DIVINE COMEDY 

And if it was a dream it was enough — 
It lasted like a world, it kept awake 
The ghost of Beatrice ; and to that break 
Of day which brake at last the dreamy stuff, 
Breaking to death the forest wild and rough. 
It lit the night, and by the troubled lake 
It spake as with her voice that never spake : 
" O peace, be still I " to all the winds thereof. 

The comedy of Dante Alighieri ! 

For dreams he left his birthright of despair. 

The lives that stiffened into statuary 

In the cathedral of his proud poor prayer. 

For him the bride beside the mother Mary 

Let down the heavenly ladders of her hair. 



[ 27 ] 



AU QUATRI£ME: RUE DES ECOLES 

I HAVE a memory of a lonely room . . . 
The walls of it were as a garden wall. 

gardens of the world, O lost perfume ! 
Outside the world I read the Fleurs du MaL 
Ah me, I seemed to understand it all. 

Till in the door I saw I know not whom. 

She said: " What are the flowers that you let fall?" 

She seemed to say : " It 's I, it 's I who bloom." 

Was I at last afraid to be alone ? 

" Who are you, woman whom I have not known ?" 

1 asked, and as she gazed: "Are you a child ?" 
Gravely she gave her lips and she was gone . . . 
Gone with her wistful answer which she smiled : 
" I am the deepest valley to the dawn." 



[^8] 



LANDSCAPE AND FIGURES 

The twilight is returning — come away! 
It gropes among the trees, it is confused 
About the golden bodies that we used 
In earnest and a little while in play. 
The twilight that has yielded up its day 
Clings to us now like some poor thing seduced 
Who on the hilly bosoms has unloosed 
The long disheveled sunlight growing gray. 

Hide from the haggard touches of the sun 
Your yielding body, that it may be one 
With all the dark ; and for the breathless bed 
Gather the quiet that the Lyra shed. 
When for the tryst supreme that no one knows 
The night had the consent of a pale rose. 



[ 29 ] 



DIALOGUE 

Be patient, Life, when Love is at the gate, 
And when he enters let him be at home. 
Think of the roads that he has had to roam. 
Think of the years that he has had to wait. 

But if I let Love in I shall be late. 
Another has come first — there is no room. 
And I am thoughtful of the endless loom — 
Let Love be patient, the importunate. 

O Life, be idle and let Love come in, 

And give thy dreamy hair that Love may spin. 

But Love himself is idle with his song. 

Let Love come last^ and then may Love last long. 

Be patient, Life, for Love is not the last. 

Be patient now with Death, for Love has passed. 



[ 30*] 



TO A DESERTED TEMPLE AT P.ESTUM 

Is it a hushed good morrow to the sea 

Or a good night, if night shall be for good. 

That thou art holding in thine attitude, 

O faithful Grecian fane in Italy ? 

Wrecked is the god who went away from thee ; 

Thou takest the shadows for thy widowhood; 

Thou hast not fallen when the winds have wooed; 

Thou art the patience of Penelope. 

So dost thou hold the attitude of Greece 
Toward one who wanders now the wood obscure. 
Yea, though the moss be thine entablature. 
The stars at last thine only mysteries, 
Amid the winds that will not let thee be 
Thou art a gesture of eternity. 



CRYSTALS 



PORTRAIT 

She has a gas-lit glitter of cold stones. 
She lives, and she makes light of lingerie; 
And she has suffered not the little ones 
To come to her, suffering you and me. 

The flesh is pretty about the gentle bones. 
And these at least — you feel ! — have modesty. 
These of her naked life the last Unknowns 
That she 's afraid as death to let you see. 



[35] 



JOHN DAVIDSON 

O NOT for him the shore crepuscular. 
The waning house, the slow obscurity; 
For him the sudden setting of a star . . . 
He has gone out like light upon the sea. 

His are the rights of memory in all lands ; 

A lord of life too haughty for a crown 

Laid on with hands of God, with his own hands 

He laid it on his head and laid it down. 



[ 36] 



TO HASEKAWA 



Perhaps it is no matter that you died ; 
Life 's an incognito which you saw through. 
You never told on Hfe — you had your pride ; 
But Hfe has told on you. 



[37] 



SONG OF THE SOULS SET FREE 

Wrap the earth in cloudy weather 

For a shroud. 

We have slipped the earthly tether. 

We *re above the cloud. 

Peep and draw the cloud together. 

Peep upon the bowed. 

What can they be bowing under. 

Wild and wan ? 

Peep, and draw the cloud asunder. 

Peep, and wave a dawn. 

It will make them rise and wonder 

Whether we are gone. 



[ 38] 



AN OLD GAME 

Is it heavenly hide and seek. 
Playmate, that you have to play ? 
When I closed my eyes to pray 
You were breathless where you lay 
On the bed, and you were weak. 
When I opened them at length 
It was you who had the strength. 
You the earthly runaway. 

Is it Seek and ye shall Jind 

On the way that you have run. 

Playmate, past the setting sun? 

Or does pale Oblivion 

Say her gentle Never mind? 

Through the emptiness of sky 

If I call no glad I spy. 

Will you care, O hidden one ? 



[39] 



AFTER-THOUGHT 

O WHAT can I be breathing for. 
Wasting the world by being sad? 
O for a breath of life ! Once more 
My life is willing to be glad. 

Even her grave is growing glad 
With grass and with the flowering suns ; 
Nor in the grave can she be sad 
To miss the waking clarions. 

She '11 not be sad if I forget — 

Hers is the way of being glad. 

Of her I need not think. And yet . . . 

It is not I, the world is sad. 



[40] 



FALLING ASLEEP 

O THE dream that dandles 
Sleepy Head ! 

Lay aside your sandals 
T^hat have fed 
Down a night of candles 
By the bed. 

O the changing pillow- 
That is bare! 

Be a weeping willow 

With your hair 

Long . . . And on your billow 

Lift me , . . where f 



[41 ] 



CONSIDER THE LILIES 

Lilies are the beckonings 
Of a world of lilies fallen. 
Yielding to alighted wings 
Secret pollen. 

Yesterdays are ghostly sheaves. 
Noon is golden on the bough. 
Life is ripe among the leaves . 
Beckon thou. 

Wave a handkerchief of prayer. 
Keep a secret in a gown. 
When the wings are in the air. 
Bow down. 



[42 ] 



TO A POET 



What are you doing like a naughty child 

To the original non-entity, 

Without a wedding and a little wild, 

Those moments when you say of beauty : " be " ? 



[43] 



TO A GARDEN IN APRIL 



Alas, and are you pleading now for pardon ? 
Spring came by night — and so there is no telling ? 
Spring had his way with you, my little garden . . , 
You hide in leaf, but oh ! your buds are swelling. 



[44] 



THE INNER SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STATUES 
SEATED OUTSIDE THE BOSTON PUBLIC 
LIBRARY 

How natural the way that they have greeted 
Each other, like two girls excused at school : 
" Sister of bronze upon the granite seated. 
Hast thou an easy stool ? " 



[45] 



A DYING SERVANT 

At last there was to be a time of rest. 

Even before she died, the very best 

Time that at last was to be all her own. 

When she should not be holding back a groan 

Just for the sake of some one else, and when 

Among the ladies and the gentlemen. 

At last being out of pain, she should not run 

Back to the duty that was left undone. 

She was left to herself. The old alarm 

Clock had run down for good, and the lukewarm 

Hot water bottles that were lying where 

They lay all day no longer mattered — her 

Cold feet did not feel cold or anything. 

But there was something of the evening 

Which she had now the time to feel. It smiled 

Upon her idleness, and like a child 

She said a " Now I lay me down to sleeps 

Left to herself, what had she left to keep 

Of her spent self except a final tryst 

For dreams, where even she might yet be kissed. 

[46] 



So when at last the mistress came and lay 
A hand upon her brow to ease away 
The difficult life, the servant, who in duty 
Without complaint had found her only beauty. 
Complained about that hand upon her brow : 
"Don't bother me — it is all over now." 



FOR THE SAKE OF PEACE 



TO THE NECROPHILE 

After reading of the affectionate desire of Germany "to get closer to 
France,''^ as expressed by the German Secretary of State to the British 
Ambassador at Berlin. 

With love are you gone mad, O lover of France, 

That you should be embracing with your arms 

Her gory body for the gore that warms 

Only a monster in his dalliance ? 

Alas ! she is alive with her alarms. 

Unwilling yet for the enraged romance. 

Assault her sacredness of Paris, lance 

Her flank with such a wound as has its charms 

For you who want for your obscene amours 
The body of a soul that is not yours, 
For you who want a wound to enter by. 
For you who want a corpse upon your heart. 
Coupling with France if France would only die. 
Not yours the human vow : " Till Death us part ! " 



[51] 



AM TAG! 

William of Germany, is this the day 
For which you have been drinking — or a night 
Which is awakened by the dynamite 
Clearing the darkness in your drunken way ? 
The deeds of darkness are not yours — you light 
Louvains about the beds of children. Yea, 
And in the churches where the women pray 
For some conception of the divine right. 

Them you enlighten, too — the right divine 
Is yours ! And from a heaven above the Rhine 
Your visitation ! And immaculate 
Is the conception as the women wait. 
Beneath the dove-like wings of aeroplanes. 
The pleasure that you feel in their remains. 



[52] 



INFINITE MERCY 

Can He who heard the plea for ignorance : 
** Forgive them, for they know not what they do ! 
Stooping to the uplifted cross of France, 
Forgive the Germans — they who know and 
knew ? 



[53] 



TO LOUVAIN 



Old city that ascended in a cloud. 
You dropped the ashes which the earth is proud 
To wear for you while all the mouths of Krupp 
Are mocking still : " Go up, bald head, go up T' 



[54] 



THE WAR LORD 

** My heart bleeds for Louvain.^' 

Whom the lord loves he chastens. And he bleeds 
That you, Louvain, are burning in his hell. 
And there is not a Christ that intercedes. 
The lord is in his heaven. All is well. 



[55] 



INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE SUBMARINE THAT 
SANK THE LUSITANIA 

Rise to an infamy, take a breath and dive, 
And to the children drowning in the sea 
Prove that there is a way to keep alive 
Beneath the level of humanity. 



[56] 



TO BELGIUM 



LiFEWARD at last, some day. 
When no one shall be left to say Alas, 
Children shall follow along the trodden way 
The lure of the reviving grass. 



[57] 



NEUTRALITY 

Not by a dirge or a psan 
Breathe of the wrongs of France ! 
Watch, Laodicean, 
And wait upon the chance. 

The game is for the great — 
And whose the sacrifice ? 
Laodicean, wait 
And watch the loaded dice ! 



TRANSLATIONS 



THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN 
Eclogue by Mallarme 



THE FAUN' 

Those nymphs, I would perpetuate them. 

Even so clear 
Their coloring light, it dances in the atmosphere 
Heavy with leafy sleeps. 

Was it a dream I loved ? 

My doubt, a mass of night primeval, is removed 

In many a subtle branch which proves, being still these 

very 
Woods, that, alas, I gave myself all solitary 
For triumph the default ideal of the rose. 
Let us reflect 

if women of whom thou thus dost gloze 
Image a longing of thy senses fanciful! 
Faun, the illusion is escaping from the cool 
Blue eyes, even as a spring in tears, of the more chaste : 
The other, though, all sighs, thou sayest is to contrast 
Even as a daytime zephyr warm upon thy fleece ! 
Not so! through the exhausted swoon and motionless 

' See the note on page 78. 
[63] 



Stifling with heats the morning fresh if it rebels. 
Murmurs that water only which my flute expels 
On the grove sprayed with notes; and the one breath 

of air 
Out of the two pipes prompt in its exhaling ere 
It scatters all around the sound in a dry sprinkle. 
Is, over the horizon that has not one wrinkle. 
The visible and tranquil breath illusory 
Of inspiration, which once more attains the sky. 

O ye Sicilian borders of a quiet swamp 

Which, to the sun's despite, is plundered by my pomp. 

Tacit beneath the flowers of sparkles, celebrate 

^'How I cut here the hollow rushes subjugate 

By skill ; when on the glaucous gold of verdurings 

Remote which dedicate their vine unto the springs. 

Billows a whiteness anifnal in the repose : 

And how in the preluding slow where the pipe grows. 

That flight of swans, ah no I of naiads springs away 

Or dives . . ." 

Inert, all is afire in tawny day. 
Not showing by what art dashed off in company 
Too much of hymen wished by one who strikes the 
key: 

[64] 



Then shall I waken to the primal zeal, upright 
And solitary in a flood antique of light, 
Lilies ! and of you all the one for artlessness. 

Other than that soft nothing which their lips express, 
The kiss, which keeps the faithless safe by its low 

sound, 
My breast, virgin of proof, bears witness to a wound 
Mysterious, occasioned by some august tooth; 
But hush ! there needs for confidant of such a truth 
The large and double reed performed upon by day : 
Which, as it sucks the trouble of the cheek away, 
Dreams, in a long extended solo, of amusing 
The beauty of the neighbourhood by a confusing 
False of that beauty and our song infatuated ; 
And that as high as love itself is modulated 
It may make vanish from the common dream of thighs 
Immaculate or backs pursued by my closed eyes, 
A loud and ineffectual monotonous line. 

Try then to flower again, pipe of the flights, malign 
Syrinx, upon the lakes where thou for me must wait ! 
I, of my rumor proud, will at great length relate 
Of goddesses, and by idolatrous imagery 
Remove the girdles yet from their obscurity : 

[65 ] 



Just so, when from the grapes I have sucked out the 

lustre. 
Laugher, I lift to summer skies the empty cluster 
To banish a regret by trickery dispersed. 
And blowing into the translucent skins, athirst 
For drunkenness, until the evening I look through. 

nymphs, let us inflate some memories new. 

" My eye, piercing the reeds, transfixed each heavenly 
Neck, which beneath the river drowns its ardency 
With cries of anger to the heaven of the wood; 
And the resplendent bath of tresses is bestrewed 
In glitterings and quiverings, O diamonds! 

1 run; when, at my feet, are coupled (with their wounds 
Of languor tasted in that pang of being twain') 

These slumberers in just their arms at hazard lain; 
Without unclasping them I lift them, and invade 
This shrubbery, detested by the frivolous shade. 
Of roses spending in the sun all fragrancy. 
Where likewise in the day consumed may our sport beP 
Curse of the virgins, I adore thee, O delight 
Ferocious of the naked burdens blest that fight 
To shun my lip afire which, as a flash of lightning 
Trembles, is drinking from the flesh the secret fright- 
ening : 

[66] 



From the unkind one's feet to bosoms of the shy. 
Who yields at once an innocence, all watery 
With foolish tears or with less doleful vaporing. 
" My crime, it is that I, glad to be conquering 
Those traitorous fears, divided the disheveled heap 
Of kisses, which the gods would well cojnmingled keep; 
For hardly had I tried to hide an ardent smile 
Under the creases glad of one (^holding the while 
By a mere finger, so that thus her plumy white 
Might color at her sister s passion now alight, 
The little one naive who never blushed at all i) 
When from my arms, undone by deaths equivocal. 
That prey ofmine,forevermore ingrate, gets free. 
Pitiless of the sob intoxicating me'' 

Well ! to the bliss by others shall I yet be led 

With their hair knotted to the horns upon my 
head: 

Thou knowest, my passion, how, all purple and full 
grown. 

Each pomegranate bursts and with the bees makes 
moan; 

And blood of ours, possessed by what it would ac- 
quire, 

Flows for the whole eternal swarm of the desire. 

[ 67 ] 



Now when this wood with gold and cinders is iU 

lumed, 
A festival is raised among the leaves consumed. 
Etna ! it is in thee by Venus visited 
With her ingenuous heels posed on thy lava bed, 
When rumbles a sleep unhappy or fades away the 

glow. 
I hold the queen ! 

O certain castigation. 

No, 

But empty of words the spirit and this body aswoon 
At last surrender to the haughty hush of noon : 
Sleep now in the oblivion of the blasphemy. 
Stretched on the thirsty sand and as I love to be 
Mouth open to the potent wine-star ! 

Couple, adieu ; 
I am to see the shadow into which ye grew. 



FIFTH CANTO OF THE INFERNO 



FIFTH CANTO 

Thus I descended from the primal zone 

Down to the second, which less space embraces. 

And so much greater pain as stings to moan. 

There Minos stands and horribly grimaces ; 
Inspects the sins about the entrancy, 
Judges, and as he girds himself he places. 

I say that when the soul born evilly 
Comes in his presence, it confesses all ; 
And that appraiser ot iniquity 

Discerns for it the hell proportional ; 
He girds his tail as many times about 
As the degrees that he will have it fall. 

Always before him stands a mighty rout; 

They go, each in its turn, for the decree ; 

They speak, they hear, and then they are cast out. 

"O thou who nearest the dolorous hostelry," 
To me, when he beheld me, Minos cried. 
Quitting the act of that great ministry, 

[ 71 ] 



" Look how thou enter, and in whom confide; 

Deceive thee not the wideness of the gate." 

And my guide answered : " Why dost thou too chide ? 

" Do not impede his course predestinate. 

Thus is it willed where is the potency 

For what is willed ; and make no more debate." 

Straightway begin the notes of misery 

To make themselves be heard ; straightway I come 

Where much lamenting makes assault on me. 

I reached a region of all radiance dumb. 

Which howls like ocean in a hurricane. 

When it is fought by winds grown quarrelsome. 

The hellish tempest, which will never wane. 
Impels the spirits with its violence; 
Whirling and buffeting, it makes their pain. 

When they approach the broken eminence. 
There are the shrieks, the plaint, the lamentation ; 
There they blaspheme at God's omnipotence. 

I learned that into such a castigation 
The evil users of the flesh are cast, 
Who reason subjugate to inclination. 

[ 72 ] 



And as their wings do bear the starlings past, 
In the cold season, in a great dense pack. 
So bears the spirits maledight that blast. 

It bears them up and down, and out and back; 
There is no hope to comfort them for aye. 
Not of repose, but even of lesser wrack. 

And as the cranes go chanting forth their lay. 
Forming themselves in air in a long trail. 
So I beheld those spirits, on that fray 

Of winds borne up, approach with sounds of wail ; 
Whereat I questioned : " Master, who are these 
Folk whom the murky air doth so assail ? " 

" The first of those about whose histories 

Thou longest to know," he answered thereupon, 

"The empress was of many languages. 

" With vice of luxury she was so undone. 

Illicit she made licit by decree, 

To take the blame in which she had been drawn. 

" She is Semiramis, and we read that she 
Succeeded Nimus and had been his spouse; 
She used to have the Soldan's empery. 

[ 73 ] 



"The next is she who broke for love her vows 
Unto Sichaeus' dust and took her life; 
Then Cleopatra the luxurious. 

" See Helena, for whom an age so rife 

With wrongs revolved ; and see Achilles grand. 

Who with his love at last fell into strife ; 

" See Paris, Tristan " ; and with pointing hand 

He showed and named a thousand shades and more. 

Whom love had out of our existence banned. 

When I had listened to my counsellor 
Naming so many an olden dame and knight, 
I was bewildered with the grief I bore. 

And I began : " Poet, would that I might 
Speak with that couple who together fly. 
And seem upon the wind to be so light." 

And he to me : *< Thou 'It see when they be by 

Us closer, and to them do thou then pray 

By love which leads them, and they will draw nigh." 

Soon as to us the tempest makes them sway, 
I raised my voice : " O spirits wearied. 
Come speak with us, if no one doth gainsay." 

[ 74] 



As doves that are by love solicited. 

Toward the sweet nest with wings held still and high. 

Come through the air by their volition sped, 

So these withdrew from Dido's company. 
Towards us approaching through the air malign. 
Such was the force of my affectionate cry. 

"O living creature, gracious and benign. 
Who through the purple air goest visiting 
Us who with blood made earth incarnadine, 

" Were friend of ours the Universal King, 
To him would we be praying for thy peace. 
Since thou dost pity our perverse suffering. 

" Of what to hear and what to say thou please. 
That will we hear and say to both of you. 
The while, as now, the wind relinquishes. 

"There sits the city wherewithin I grew 
Upon the shore to which descends the Po, 
To be at peace with all his retinue. 

" Love, which in gentle hearts is soon aglow. 
Caught him with the fair body of which I be 
Bereft, and still for me the way works woe. 

[ 75 ] 



" Love, which from loving leaves no loved one free. 
Caught me with the so great delight therefrom. 
Not yet, thou seest, does it abandon me. 

" Love led us onward to a single doom ; 
For him who slew us doth Caina wait." 
Away from them to us did these words come. 

When I had heard those spirits desolate, 
I bowed my head, and bowed I let it be 
Till the seer said: " What dost thou meditate? " 

When I made answer I began : "Ah, me ! 

How many tender thoughts, how great a yearning 

Led these unto the pass of misery! " 

And once again I spake, and toward them turning. 

Began : " Francesca, this thy mortifying 

Moves me to tears with pity and with mourning. 

" But tell me : at the time of the sweet sighing. 
What way and at what sign did love dispose 
That ye should know the longings mystifying ? " 

And she to me : " There are no greater woes 
Than the remembrances of happy days 
In misery ; and this thy teacher knows. 

[ 76] 



" But since to learn about the earliest ways 
Of this our love thou hast a wish so dear, 
I will do even as one who weeps and says. 

" Upon a day we read for our good cheer 
Of Lancelot, how love held him in thrall; 
We were alone and without any fear. 

" That reading urged at many an interval 
Our eyes together and paled the cheeks of us ; 
But it was just one moment made us fall. 

"When we had read how one so amorous 
Had kissed the smile that he was longing for. 
This one, who always must be by me thus. 

Kissed me upon the mouth, trembling all o'er ; 
Galeot the book, and he 't was written by ! 
Upon that day we read in it no more." 

So sorely did the other spirit cry. 

While the one spake, that for the very dread 

I swooned as if I were about to die. 

And I fell down even as a man falls dead. 



NOTE TO "THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN" 

What is the sense of " L'Apres-midi d'un Faune," a 
masterpiece that is almost popular — in so far as it is known 
as the poem by Mallarme — as a " miracle of obscurity"? 
The better known music which interprets the poem for 
Debussy and the dance which interprets it for Nijinsky are 
independent works of art ; and the critical interpretations of 
Gosse and Remy de Gourmont are certainly either groping 
or a little superficial. The obvious love-story which seems to 
be what they see in " L'Apres-midi d'un Faune " is in re- 
ality a philosophic allegory. " L'Apres-midi d'un Faune " is 
one of the great dream-fictions, the greatest of which is the 
Divina Commedia. It is a dream within a day-dream — a sort 
of solipsistic drama in which the dreams are the symbols 
which the dreamer has invented for his desires, and which 
he strives by all the human means of logic, art, and action to 
endow with actual existence. 

The faun, the solitary dreamer, is a compound of sensu- 
ality and imagination ; and he is so divided by his double 
nature that, both in the long soliloquy which he dramatises 
by addressing himself and replying to himself and in the pa- 
thetic fallacy of the act with which the drama culminates, he 
mistakes himself for two. And thedoubleness which he finds 
in himself he finds in that compound of the actual and the 
illusory which is his world. It is not the poem, however 

[ 78 ] 



difficult it may be, which is obscure. The poem is a clear 
picture, always coherent and precise, of a mind humanly 
obscure to itself in the presence of the natural confusion. 
The remarkable duplicity with which almost every word in 
the poem is made to express a double meaning is an index 
to the ingenuity of such a mind in its attempt to reconcile 
the inherent contradictions. 

When in the first words of the poem the faun exclaims: — 

" Those nymphs, I would perpetuate them," 

he is half awakened — as I think — from a dream which he 
is still mistaking for the reality, so undisturbing is the tran- 
sition from the brilliant dream itself of rosy nudities to the 
sun and roses of his Sicilian solitude. In a moment, how- 
ever, as the nymphs who have already excited his passion 
seem to be melting away, his waking certainly is troubled 
by a doubt. Were they real or a dream or a waking halluci- 
nation due to physical desire? They were not a dream — 
as he argues, naive in his error — since he imagines now that 
he had simply mistaken for his victims the flesh-colored 
roses in the wood. And they were not an hypnagogic hal- 
lucination — as he naively continues to argue — for the 
simple reason that as he plays upon his flute he is com- 
pletely engrossed in the pure inspiration of his music. 

Baffled in his attempt to understand the true nature of 
the nymphs who have now disappeared, the faun, with a 
sort of hedonistic scepticism, resigns himself to his memo- 
ries of the wonderful experience as the only truth available. 

[ 79] 



Invoking to his aid the quiet swamp where grow the rushes 
from which he makes his pipes, he remembers — his memo- 
ries are recorded throughout the poem in the italicised pas- 
sages — how, as he was tuning up, he startled into flight 
a group of nymphs whom he at first mistook for swans ; 
how he spied on them as they bathed in the stream ; and 
how, as he followed them again, he came upon two who 
were clasped together in amorous sleep ; how he carried 
them off into a thicket of roses ; how he delighted in their 
struggles ; and how, just as he was kissing one and holding 
the other by a finger which was not, perhaps, so simple as 
he says, they finally escaped, leaving him still unsatisfied. 

This record of his memories the faun interrupts from 
time to time by a running commentary in which he deter- 
mines that the only trace of the vanished nymphs — since 
they have left no trace in the environment — is the invisible 
wound in his breast. The pain which they have left behind 
he immediately attempts to assuage by diverting it into 
music. The diversion, however, is in the end unsatisfying ; 
and throwing away his useless instrument, he attempts by 
poetising to inflate the remembered past into a sort of falla- 
cious present, which is indeed the essence of the descriptive 
arts. But in spite of all ingenious use of memory and imagi- 
nation the departure of the nymphs leaves him still unsatis- 
fied ; nothing imaginative can satisfactorily substitute the 
reality ; and under the domination of his growing passion, 
he attempts to realize his dream by action. Deceived by 
the remarkable vagary about Etna into a belief that he has 

[80] 



actual possession of Venus, he is betrayed into an act which 
brings with it the final disillusion. From the tragic self- 
defeat of that high dream of perpetuating nymphs there is 
now no refuge but sleep — a drunken sleep in which he may 
lose himself completely. 

When the faun, as he accordingly falls asleep, exclaims at 
the end of the poem: — 

" Couple, adieu ; 
I go to see the shadow into which ye grew," — 

it is noon, and the attempt which he has made throughout 
the morning to perpetuate the dream of the preceding night 
is finally abandoned. " The Afternoon of a Faun " is the 
afternoon of sleep which follows — the afternoon which 
is never mentioned in the text and which is only for a 
moment foreshadowed as " the oblivion of the blasphemy." 
It is as if the poem began as it is ending. The words ad- 
vance as far as the threshold of unconsciousness. " The rest 
is silence " — a silence in which the dreamer and the dream, 
after the essential separation, are reconciled at last in a 
common extinction. 




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